A close reading revealed an unconsciously attuned fable from the front lines of a boy’s hope and desolation. My first “exposé” revealed the secret of the genteel nursery: an airless coffin of emotional starvation where only lunar flights of imagination saved my psyche from crashing and burning. How stunning that my stunningly beautiful mother, Planet Janet, was not the earth mother falsely advertised by the glossy surface but a breed of female impersonator; all the more stunning that some children are able to find alternate landing strips, and ways to keep breathing. Though she chose to save my story, she never got the message. The day had come when, finally, I did: from the start, my outwardly vital mother was inwardly as petrified as wood, beyond softening, beyond saving, my childhood of endless effort all for naught.
As the lawyer read us her will, I was amazed by my one-third inheritance—money that she herself had largely inherited. She had often threatened to disinherit me, and I had called her bluff, but here it was. While I did not join the millionaire class of many of my UCC peers, I was able to clear my debts, stabilize my life and, ironically, finish the family memoir that, had my mother lived long enough to read, would have finished her.
As a pre-verbal child, I could have my mother, my first love and first death, only by sitting stone-silent at her feet, pretending to read a book upside-down, my head turning backward to check, like Orpheus, if she was still there—finding her forever there-but-not-there. I waited her out, a misguided act of faith and hope, as if we had nothing but time for her to wake up and love me, so that I might love others. Mortally fearful of spontaneous play, my mother once branded me “a nasty piece of work.” Even as I type out those words, I wonder, yet again, if it is true that most or all working writers write for their mothers. Is giving up the nasty work of writing the only, or best, way to let her die for good?
Odyssey 30th Reunion, Toronto, 1998, restaging 1968 Rüdesheim photo
TWENTY-FIVE
Reunion
On August 12, 2008, exactly four decades since I had crossed the threshold of the Rüdesheim hotel room to find Sally clutching George’s telegram, Katy and I boarded a plane for Vancouver Island where we planned a two-week car trip. The holiday was designed to culminate with a weekend-long Odyssey reunion, our fortieth, hosted by Nan in late August at her summer cottage on Salt Spring Island.
I had not spoken with George since our last reunion in 1998 when over the phone he revealed his prescient dream of Sally’s death. I had kept the dream on ice for a decade now, telling only a select few, and then in muted tones, as if testing the listener’s—and my own—credulity.
Only ten of the twenty-seven members were making the trek—Nan, Robin, Rich, Walter, Steve, Peter, Stan, Kathy, Kat, me—but several were bringing spouses, curious to meet a group bound together by the strangely far-fetched story of a doomed girl from the doomed sixties. Our three previous reunions were held in Toronto, so I had not seen the “West Coast girls” in forty years; maybe this would be the one when I finally cracked open whatever it was I felt I must feel. As I stood in Nan’s living room, a sweet vermouth in hand, I felt as if I had set up a camera on a tripod to shoot a lucid dream, my anticipation of the evening pulling from my gut a queasy thrill.
In strode Kat Joy, the unforgotten, feline seventeen-year-old matured by the decades, hair now streaked with vibrant grey, and it was a joy to see her. Within no time we were swept back to the West German highway, for she was one of the six eyewitnesses. As we reconnected, I realized that all this time I had been tending a safe, sanitized, stuck-in-neutral picture of what had happened on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 13, 1968.
As Kat’s passionate, detailed account of the accident poured out—“I was traumatized”—my body rippled with adrenalin. All this time, the obvious had escaped me: no one had ever had ever used the word “trauma” when speaking of the impact of Sally’s death. For three days afterwards, Kat revealed, her body had shaken, robbed of sleep despite the sedatives Tammy gave her, for she could not stem the hammering thought, it could have been me. As she spoke, I was pitched back to the courtyard of the Paris hotel. What had stopped me from reaching out to Kat in the nights of her terrible distress? Or John? I denied her, denied him, and Sally, and all the others, most of all myself. For the trance broken with a rush of words, for the image of the head wound I was finally admitting through the temples of my own head, I gave quiet thanks.
That first evening, dining at a local restaurant, we took turns voicing sweet soliloquies on the summer of ’68, our personal, state-of-the-reunion addresses. The next day, Nan organized a scavenger hunt, twelve of us stuffed into three cars, zipping around leafy backroads like rowdy teenagers. Conference calling with missing bodies in Toronto and Vancouver, I tapped into the vein of indefinable Odyssey euphoria; I knew it when I felt it, and I knew it would pass.
Before we headed to the ferry back to the mainland, Nan suggested what I sensed was coming. She knew I was currently struggling to pull together the final scenes of my emotionally exhausting family memoir in which I had assembled the deeply repressed secrets of my eminent yet self-destructive grandfather. I was drawn to the tragic, so why not write Sally’s story? I protested, “I wouldn’t dream of approaching George. Her death has haunted him for years.”
Failing to add, as if it has not haunted me.
But Nan’s words endured as a kind of permission. Whether confronting unloving parents, or shame-driven prep schools, or heartless psych wards, I felt a familiar prod to serve as the detective on the case—to chalk outlines on the asphalt, to circle the obscenities no one wanted to see or hear or remember or speak or feel—torn between needing to know, and not know, more. The French writer Georges Bataille once said there were three things on which humans cannot bear to steadily fix their gaze—the sun, the genitals and death. But were not artists compelled to challenge the gods? Why did I keep fixing my gaze on the rearview mirror? What was it I was trying to retrieve, fix, restore? My horror of the random?
* * *
—
With What Disturbs Our Blood in the final stage of production, I was reaching another crossroad in my life. I had come a long way since the day twenty-six years earlier when I’d retreated into the eighth floor of a concrete apartment block in downtown Toronto, suspended in a holding pattern, waiting for exactly I knew not what.
In the crucible of two difficult books, I had slowly expanded my range (and rage), struggling to balance my inner and outer lives. By August 2009, I felt ready to make a not-so-sudden move—moving in with Katy. In the unconscious script of my life, my mother had written in invisible ink that I would never know intimacy with a woman other than her; living common law with an uncommon woman felt like smashing the ultimate taboo.
I rented the first-floor apartment of Katy’s house while she occupied the upper two floors, and we split our time evenly, alone and together. Three years had passed since my mother’s death, and in sudden, unguarded moments I experienced her absence as a powerful presence. In our disconnected, over-controlling mothers, Katy and I intuitively shared something profound, and each day, each night, I let the emptiness fill, like hot water running into a tub.
By making a wide berth for my mother-made pendulum swings, we moved closer to each other. For the first time I allowed tears to coincide with sex. But in unpredictable moments, the monster-nightmares of the third floor of Balmoral slipped through the newly formed opening. I curled up and played possum, eyes wide shut, emitting the low growl of the terrified prey. Session by session with Peter, I learned to drop my childhood defences, open my eyes to the darkness, and stare down the body-snatching beast; each time, Katy remained a calm ally. Gradually the nocturnal break-and-enters tapered off to next to nothing. The power of love was forcing my own silent complicity into retreat.
As I put What Disturbs Our Blood to bed, I was aware that I was laying my father-ghosts to rest; on its heels came the half-realization that if I invoked the ghost of Sally through the rite of writing, I was now invo
king the motherlode. After an epic run of twenty-six years, I left Peter, and via the timely recommendation of a friend, I started working with a woman psychotherapist, Eva, aptly of German blood, trained in art therapy and relational psychoanalysis. I was much taken, then stirred up, by the coincidence that she worked out of a three-storey stone house in the epicentre of my primal dreamscape at Dunvegan Road and St. Clair Avenue, precisely equidistant between my two childhood homes. As with Peter, I felt lucky to find a workable rapport with a strong, gifted and compassionate human being; as with Peter, I used the sessions to keep open the channels of my unconscious and construct the narrative of the three generations of my family history. I knew that killing your parents and grandparents took time; but now it was more about letting them die.
With Eva, I defied the biblical-parental injunction against curiosity and deepened my pursuit of the forbidden fruit of unconscious knowledge. I read her the “Rokeit Man” story, and unlike my mother, she instantly got it. Gradually, new patterns and meanings emerged; I realized I was enacting a transference, the glib song-and-dance man revivifying the dead mother with the spinning plates of jokes and stories, planting a fixed image of the past on the face of the real, responsive, in-the-moment person sitting directly in front of me. “Let me help paddle the canoe,” Eva interjected one day, and I felt a subtle loosening of my rigorous Upper Canadian literacy sinking into something freer, looser, unscripted. This time, could I safely throw off the harness of my Grade 8 thesaurus?
* * *
—
Jane Wodehouse was now living in a retirement home, the Balmoral Club, a five-minute stroll from Eva’s office. Over the phone, I explained my recent contact with George and the fact that I wished to write a book on her long-dead daughter. I tried to explain my motives, even as I didn’t fully understand them myself. She invited me for lunch. Coincidentally, Sally’s sister, Diana, was visiting from her home in Nova Scotia, so it was the three of us.
A year short of her ninetieth birthday, Jane appeared at her door impeccably attired, impossibly youthful. When she extended her hand—she called me by my De Grassi name of Jamie—I insisted on a hug. After lunch, we moved upstairs to her apartment. For an hour Jane reminisced poignantly about her lost daughter. Mostly I felt awkward and intrusive; I couldn’t bring myself to ask, Why was Sally’s funeral rushed? Why didn’t you wait for us? As I rose to leave, she pulled from memory an image of my newlywed parents visiting De Grassi in the summer of 1947, myself unborn, smooching in their parked car as Jane drove past.
Next came a chain of one-on-one talks with each member of the Odyssey, as if I was emulating the film 56 Up. Our group now formed a generally healthy, standard-bearing cross-section of decent, responsible, middle-class, liberal-minded Canadian civilization: teaching, law, medicine, nursing, accounting, engineering, business, journalism, philanthropy. Rich was a co-recipient, with eight hundred other scientists, of a 2007 Nobel Prize recognizing the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change headed by Al Gore—the same Rich who, after an all-night Odyssey bacchanal, laid himself open to the weather conditions of the late sixties as we stepped over his unconscious body sprawled across a morning-dewed lawn.
Only five of us were unmarried and childless; some were reclusive, alcoholic, divorced, dogged by chronic illness, the inevitable shocks of life that no class privilege could stave off. But there was a high rate of long-lived marriages, thriving lines of children and grandchildren, niches of bourgeois solidity I once disdained and now often envied. One night during the round of interviewing, I dreamed that I was toking up with Eric, Jack and Ginger, the feuding power trio of Cream, urging them to stay together. What was it about 1968?
I gathered up the memory fragments of the six other occupants of Sally’s bus, piecing together a mosaic of the accident. Like my experience with the making of Old Boys, I encountered the Rashomon effect—the inevitable variability in the accounts of witnesses to a single scene, the proverbial blind men groping for the elephant of memory. But as each witness stepped into the box of my digital recorder, as their voices raised Sally’s ghost, I did sense something close to certainty—spokes of guilt radiating from the hub of a turning wheel—and I flattered myself to think that in the act of listening, and writing, I might deliver a quantum of absolution. For myself as much as anyone.
* * *
—
How quickly, one by one, the sound of each familiar voice spirits me back there, back to the dock in Koblenz where I am lingering on the deck of the Rhine steamer, catching from above the sight of Sally below, vivid and laughing in her floral dress, the best thing I never had, sprinting ahead to the waiting buses. In the flush of George’s telegrammed proposal, she’s belting out “See You in September.”
Under a drizzling sky, our convoy is heading westward through the Mosel Valley on a short 120-kilometre jaunt to Luxembourg, with Steve’s bus in the lead. Over the first hour, John badgers Steve to let him take the wheel; Steve does not realize that Nick has forbidden John to drive, but his head is throbbing with a hangover, so he is tempted. As he pulls into a village gas station to refuel, Steve thinks, It’s just a short run to Luxembourg, so what’s the harm? Simultaneously, Sally asks Kat, who has been serving as navigator, if they can change places; over the six weeks of the trip so far, she has yet to ride up front. For both John and Sally, it feels like a last chance because after Paris we are surrendering the buses for trains.
I am the map reader in the front seat of Nick’s bus, the second in the convoy, and cruising toward the gas station we notice Steve’s bus refuelling. Our heads swing to look long enough to see John climbing into the driver’s seat, taking over from Steve; long enough to see Sally climb in next to him, taking over from Kat; long enough for the ever-vigilant Nick, at my side, to speak the words I will never forget: “That’s a mistake.”
As Sally settles into the front seat, she hears a joshing voice from the back: “You’re in the suicide seat now.” John pulls the bus to the lip of the highway; a construction barrier partly obscures his westward view. Map spread on her lap, leaning her back against the door and facing John, Nurse Sally, ever the caretaker, tries to help the driver untested in Europe negotiate the move. In his nervous excitement, he releases the clutch and presses the gas pedal a touch out of sync, and the bus lurches into the middle of the road and stalls. He turns the key to restart, and as he grinds the gear into reverse, trying to pull back, a black Mercedes sweeps up from the right side; John sees it coming, everyone in the back seats sees it coming, everyone but Sally, and time slows to a crawl.
The Mercedes is moving at roughly 30 mph when the driver sees the bus nosing the middle white line. He hits the brakes, horn blaring, swerving to the right to avoid a collision, which he does, except something known as fate determines that his bumper clips the hinged edge of the passenger door ever so slightly, yet with enough force to swing the rear of the bus roughly two feet in a semi-circle and pitch open Sally’s door. In a slow, arching, dream-like motion, she falls—zufall is German for “coincidence”—blindsided, backwards and downward, heels over head, onto the middle of the road.
Steve is the first to her side. “I’ve hurt my head,” she rasps. He asks for something to place under her neck, and Liz throws her raincoat from the back seat. Lying in the westbound lane, Sally is conscious, talking, and as people gather in a circle, traffic backs up both ways. The girls are hysterical, the boys stoic. Even as American GIs arrive, like the 7th Cavalry, lugging a stretcher from a nearby army base, even as Steve does not consider her injury serious, the seven minds of the bus have split in seven directions.
In Kat’s mind, she hears Sally unleashing a torrent of profanity—“motherfucker, cocksucker, fuck shit fuck shit fuck fuck fuck”—yet the others hear nothing of the kind. John and Liz and Kat and Ross and Walter blank out, each in their own ways, retaining nothing of the hours to come. Ross saw the car coming, but what stopped him from warning Sally? For years into the future, whenever Walter
hears the everyday sound of gears grinding in traffic, his mind will flood with the image of Sally in the middle of the road. The source of Liz’s blanking out traces back four years to the time when, as a fourteen-year-old, she lost three family members within a year—her uncle to suicide, her father to a car crash and a grandfather to a fire—and the past petrifies the present and the future.
Our third and fourth buses are backed up in the traffic jam a hundred yards down the road. Although she can’t see anything from the window, Marywinn thinks, Sally has been in an accident, a conviction reinforced as she sees Ross sprinting down the road toward them. Tammy pulls over and walks up with Ross to the accident scene. When she returns, she tells Marywinn: “Sally is hurt. Do you want to go with her in the ambulance?”
Marywinn finds Sally lying on her back in the middle of the road. She has lost consciousness and blood is trickling from her left ear. From the shoulder of the road Tammy’s bus pulls in, but people are not allowed to crowd around. Nan’s first thought: Sally’s father is a doctor and he will save her. An ambulance pulls up, operated by a farmer and his wife. After a policeman draws a chalk outline around the limp body on the black asphalt, Sally is lifted into the back on a stretcher, Marywinn climbing in beside her.
Dreaming Sally Page 26
